‘Would I?’ The newsman grinned wolfishly. ‘I’ll get out the extra, yes; but I’ll do a lot more than that. I’ll print a hundred thousand dodgers and drop ’em from copters. I’ll have blimps dragging streamers all over the sky. I’ll buy time on every radio and tri-di station in town—have the juiciest bits of these tapes broadcast, every hour on the hour. Mister, I’ll tear this town wide open before sundown tonight!’
He left, breathing fire and sulphurous smoke, and Cloud made motions to attract the Manarkan’s attention.
‘Nadine? These Tomingans take things big, don’t they? All to the good, with one exception—will any repercussions—flare-backs—hit you? Those characters are tough, and will be desperate, and I wouldn’t want to put you in line with a blaster.’
TSTo … almost certainly not,’ Nadine replied, after a minute of thought. ‘They are looking for a telepath with a voice, which they won’t find on Tominga. They know Manarkans well— many of us live here permanently—and I’m quite sure that none
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of the gang would suspect such an unheard-of thing as Vesta and I have been doing. They are not imaginative, and such a thing never happened before—not here, at least.’ ‘No? Why not? What’s strange about it?’ ‘The whole situation is new—unique. This is probably the first time in history that these exact circumstances—especially in regard to personnel—have come together. Consider, please, the ingredients: a real and bitter grievance, victims willing and anxious to take drastic action, a sympathetic telepath who is also an expert in shorthand, a master linguist, and, above all, a director or programmer—you—both able and willing to fit the parts together so that they work.’
‘Um … m … m. Never thought of it in that way. Could be, I guess. Well, all we can do now is wait and see what happens.’
They waited, and saw. The crusading editor did everything he had promised. The extra hit the streets, its headlines screaming ‘CORRUPTION!’ in the biggest type possible to use. The taped conversations, with names, amounts, times, and places, were printed in full. The accompanying editorial should have been written with sulphuric acid on asbestos paper. The leaflets, gaily littering the city, were even more vitriolic. Every hour, on the hour, speakers gave out what sound trucks were blaring continuously—irrefutable proof that the city of Mingia was being run by a corrupt, rotten, vicious machine.
Mingia’s citizens responded, but not quite as enthusiastically as the Blaster, from his limited acquaintance with the breed, had expected. There was some organizing, some demonstrating; but there was also quite a lot of ‘So what? If they don’t, some other gang of politicians will.’
Cloud, however, when he went to his rooms after supper, was well pleased with what he had seen. They couldn’t blast 53, not after the events of the afternoon. The Chickladorians and Vesta and Nadine, when they came in, agreed with him. The situation was under control. They were tired, they said. It had been a long, hard day, and they were going to hit the sack. They left.
Cloud intended to stay awake until midnight, just to see what would happen, but he didn’t. He was tired, too, and within a couple of minutes after he relaxed, alone, he was sound asleep in his chair.
Thus he did not hear the vicious thunder-clap of the atomic explosion at midnight; did not see the reflected brilliance of its
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glare. Nor did he hear the hurrying footsteps in the hotel’s corridors. What woke him up was the concussion that jarred the whole neighborhood when a half-ton bomb demolished the building which had been Number One’s headquarters.
Cloud jumped up, then, and ran out into the hall and along it to Vesta’s room. He pounded. No answer. The door was unlocked. He opened it. Vesta was not there!
Nadine was gone, too. So were the Chickladorians.
He rushed up to the lobby, only to encounter again the difficulty that had stopped him short before. He could not make himself understood! He didn’t know three words of Upper Plateau, and nobody he could find knew even one word of English, Spanish, spaceal, or any other language at his command.
He took an elevator down to the street level and flagged a cruising cab. He handed the driver the largest Tomingan bill he had; then, pointing straight ahead and making furious pushing motions, he made it plain that he knew were he wanted to go, and wanted to get there in a hurry. The hacker, stimulated by more cash than he had seen for a week, drove wherever Cloud pointed; and broke—or at least bent—most of Mingia’s speed-laws in his eagerness to oblige.
Cloud’s destination, of course, was the space-port; but when he got to the Vortex Blaster I, Jim wasn’t there any more. None of his crew was aboard, either. The lifeboats were all in place, but the flitter was gone. So were both suits of armor—and the semi-portables—and the spare DeLameters—and both needles —even his space-hatchet!
He went up to the control room and glanced over the board. Everything was on zero except one meter, which was grazing the red. All four semis and both needles were running wide open—pulling every watt they could possibly draw!
Angry as he was, Cloud did not think of cutting the circuit. If he had thought of it he wouldn’t have done it. He didn’t know exactly what his officers were doing, of course, but he could do a shrewd job of guessing. If he had known what they were up to he wouldn’t have permitted it, but it was too late to do anything about it now. With those terrific weapons in operation they might get back alive—without them, they certainly would not. What a land-office business those semis were doing!
They were.
Tommie and her brother, wearing Cloud’s two suits of armor,
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were each carrying a semi-portable; wielding it, if not as easily as an Earthly gunner wields a sub-machine-gun, much more effectively. They were burning down a thick steel door. Well behind them, the third semi was bathing the whole front of the building in a blinding glare of radiance. In back, the fourth was doing the same to the rear wall. On the sides, the two needle-beams were darting from window to window, burning to a crisp any gangster gunner daring to show his head to aim.
For the Tomingans had not been nearly as optimistic as had Cloud, and they had made complete preparation for reprisal in case Number One should make good his threat. The Manarkan had been willing to cooperate. Thlaskin, ditto. Vesta had been quiveringly eager. Maluleme had gone along. They had not mutinied—they simply did not tell Cloud a thing about what they were going to do.
Number One had not been in his headquarters, of course, when that thousand-pound bomb let go. He thought himself safe—but he wasn’t. Nadine the telepath knew exactly where he was and exactly what he was doing. Vesta the linguist poured the information along, via the Hitter’s broadcaster, to the receivers of hundreds of ground-cars and copters far below. Thlaskin the Master Pilot kept the flitter close enough to the fleeing Number One so that Nadine could read him—fully, she thought—but far enough away to avoid detection. Thus, where-ever he went, Number One was pursued relentlessly, and his merciless pursuers closed in faster and faster.
Number One’s flight, however, was not aimless. He knew that a snooper was on him, and had enough power of mind to shield a few highly important thoughts. He wasn’t really THE Big Shot. He had called Yellow Castle, though, and they had told him that he could come in in one hour—the army would be ready. But did he have an hour, or not?
He did; just barely. The saps were snapping at his heels when he switched to a jet job and took off in a screaming straight line for the Castle.
Vesta wanted to ram him, to drop a lifeboat on him, to wreck him in any way possible; but Thlaskin refused. Captain Cloud would be mad enough at what they’d done already—any such rought stuff as that would be altogether too damn much! And, since the rebel jets were still on the ground, Number One had reached sanctuary unharmed.
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Yellow Castle, however, was not as impregnable as the gangsters had supposed. They had armor, true, but it was not at all like Cloud’s. They had weapons, true, but nothing even faintly resembling the frightful semi-portable projectors of the Galactic Patrol—nothing even remotely approaching the Patrol’s beam-fed needle beams.
Thus the Tomingans, Tommie and Jim, stood in armor of proof scarcely an arm’s length from Yellow Castle’s heavy steel door and burned it down into a brooklet of molten metal. Then on in; blasting down everything that resisted and, finally, everything that moved. Nor did any gangster escape. Those who managed to avoid the armored pair were blasted by one of the other semis or speared by one of the needles.